I am amazed and confused. Like is it a later? Is it multiple layers working together? Is it something already in the engine? If so, how do they make it so pretty?
In: Technology
It’s not really an in-depth explanation, but as far as I know, there’s always a couple of layers with textures (giving the surface its color and look) and shaders (helping react to light and creating reflections).
On the other hand, ripples and waves are made with math (fun 😁) and formulas called noise. These create an illusion it’s in constant motion.
Nowadays, Unreal Engine 5 has built-in tools and makes water as well as many of the the objects look pretty on its own (through rendering systems like Lumen and Nanite). These help devs in the sense you don’t make everything from scratch anymore.
Usually a mesh with noise maps to displace it along with animated textures and some particle fx. This gets a decent basic water effect.
so in games water is usually made with shaders and textures. it can be layers for waves reflections and even light. some engines have built in tools to make it look real nice. it’s like magic in a code form. and yeah it totally vibes with the scenery
so water in games is like magic but really its just a mix of textures shaders and reflections often combined with physics for realism. some engines have built in water effects but devs can tweak em for that wow factor. it’s all about those little details that make it look alive. pretty cool huh
Digital Foundry did a video on this covering the evolution of water in games. I haven’t watched it in a while and I don’t recall if they cover gameplay mechanics or just rendering, but it’s worth watching:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwHs22kd4S4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwHs22kd4S4)
water in games is like magic really. they use layers and shaders to make it look cool. also reflections and refractions help a ton. it’s all about tricks to make it feel real without needing real water. mad skills for sure
Each game typically finds its own best way, so it’s often done differently in different games (often even in games using the same engine), especially if the player can go underwater, because this means water has significant gameplay implications, and gameplay obviously differs enormously between games.
With modern engines that have a lot of tools, these days how to portray water is an art direction decision more than a technical one, with the usual caveat of beauty-vs-performance often being a tradeoff. It’s also the sort of thing that a technical artist might be tasked with, or a collaboration between departments; the art department needs it to look a certain way, while the design department needs the implementation requirements to not conflict much with how it would be used in maps, while the engineering department might be involved if standard or out-of-the-box techniques are falling short of producing what one of the other departments wants so some special water handling features need to be created.
Typically moving from above water to below water is multiple layers working together: a visual layer of surface from above, another of surface from below, some shoreline interaction stuff, some kind of switch/detection layer to select game-mechanics, visual overlay & atmospherics, sound adjustment, etc, and sometimes a division in the level/map sectors, depending on how it’s implemented
The visual layer typically uses a reflection cube rather than raytracing for reflections because the difference is visually all but imperceptible and the performance advantage is massive. Sometimes the reflection cube might be recalculated from time to time, especially if the scene changes (day to sunset to night, etc)
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